Fletch Blu-ray Review

The Chevy Chase comedy arrives on Blu-ray disguised as a special edition.

In addition to his recurring role as Clark Griswald in the Vacation series, the one role that ex-SNL funnyman Chevy Chase is most identified with is that of Los Angeles undercover reporter Irwin "Fletch" Fletcher. The protagonist of a series of novels by Gregory Mcdonald made the leap to the silver screen in the 1985 film Fletch and became a much-quoted favorite of the hipster set.

"Jane Doe" is the name under which Fletch publishes his columns for an unnamed L.A. newspaper and when we meet him, he's looking into drug trafficking on the beach and acting as a low-grade junkie to gain the trust of the users and main dealer, Fat Sam (Cheers' George Wendt). Fat Sam is just the retailer, Fletch is looking into the source and the extended nature of the investigation is frustrating his editor, Frank (Richard Libertini), who just wants Fletch to print something.

One day Fletch is given an odd proposition by wealthy air transport company owner Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson): Stanwyk wants Fletch to murder him in exchange for $50,000 and a ticket to Brazil to hide out until the heat blows over. The reason given is that he's got bone cancer which will lead to an extremely painful demise, but while punching his ticket to avoid the pain isn't a problem, his life insurance won't pay off in the event of suicide, thus the need to hire some homeless junkie to do the ticket punching for him.

It seems like a pretty foolproof plan with an airtight alibi, so Fletch agrees to do Stanwyk the favor and then proceeds to start digging into Stanwyk's personal and business dealings with the assistance of Larry (Geena Davis), his Girl Friday at the paper. As he follows the trail, he finds out that much of Stanwyk's wealth was courtesy of his marriage to Gail (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson) and there are shenanigans afoot with land deals and the drug trafficking that Fletch has been investigating, drawing the harsh attention of the crooked police chief Karlin (Joe Don Baker).

What's made Fletch such an enduring favorite isn't the rather convoluted story, but the way Fletch conducts his investigation by a series of disguises and personas which allow Chase plenty of opportunity to riff and toss off sarcastic asides. Though it came only six months after Beverly Hills Cop and probably wasn't directly influenced by that Eddie Murphy vehicle, there are numerous similarities including the gritty plot underlying the antics -- remember that the onscreen execution of Axel Foley's friend is the inciting incident -- and the '80s flashback-inducing soundtrack of pop-R&B tunes and BHC composer Harold Faltermeyer's one-theme-for-all-scenes scoring.

Fletch is presented in 1.85:1 widescreen using the VC-1 codec on a single-layered BD25 disc consuming 23 gigs of disc space. It's hard to really fault Universal for the quality of this transfer -- the print hasn't aged well over the past 20 years, so the film has a soft, ugly, degraded look to it. A heavy haze of grain and noise cloud the print in virtually every scene. Colors are washed out and contrast is flat. Black levels are yucky and details are minimal.

That said, this encode is much better than the recently released DVD. The image is sharper, cleaner and more detailed than the standard definition transfer despite the rabid print flaws that plague this release. It's a shame Fletch looks as old, murky and dated as it does, but I imagine there's little Universal could do to clean and polish this print beyond a complete frame-by-frame overhaul. And such a procedure is time-consuming, not to mention expensive.